New effort is underway to collect on-line sales tax

Senator Mike Enzi is part of an effort to allow states to collect sales taxes from out of state on-line merchants. The Wyoming Administrator of the Excise Tax Division Dan Noble says the state supports this. Noble says some companies voluntarily collect the tax, but many do not.

“But there are a lot of vendors that do not have a physical presence in the state that are not collecting our tax and I think one of the biggest ones is Amazon.”

He says changing that would put Wyoming merchants on a level playing field with out of state businesses.

“A remote vendor doesn’t incur some of the costs that a brick and mortar store does, there are a number of factors that make it difficult to do business and what this really does is it just takes the tax out of the equation.”

Noble says studies suggest that Wyoming loses 16 million to 28 million dollars a year in sales tax revenue to on-line companies.